The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
An application executed by a host (e.g., a personal computer, tablet computer, or smartphone) may send one or more pages of image data to be printed by a printer. For example, the application provides the image data to a printer driver. The printer driver implements rendering software to encode (e.g., compress) the image data into raster data. The raster data may indicate location and attributes for each page element of a printed page. For example, the raster data may include position, color, and size. The raster data may indicate horizontal and vertical positions using a two-dimensional coordinate system (e.g., X, Y) and may indicate a sequential drawing order Z. For example, Y corresponds to a line on a page, and X corresponds to a particular pixel in the line Y.
The printer receives the encoded image data (i.e, the raster data) from the host, decodes the encoded image data, and prints a page corresponding to the image data. For example, the printer may include one or more processors that execute firmware stored in memory and communicate with a decoder.